Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an Icelandic composer, was recently named the New York Philharmonic Kravis Emerging Composer.CreditCreditHrafn Asgeirsson

By William Robin

Aug. 19, 2015

Listening to a recent album of Icelandic music from the chamber ensemble Nordic Affect is a bit like driving across the country from which its composers hail: The terrain changes radically every few minutes, but a sense of the uncanny unifies the landscape. “Clockworking,” released last month on the Sono Luminus label, forms an absorbing and persuasively performed snapshot of Icelandic composition today. The album brims with compellingly quizzical sounds, from Thuridur Jonsdottir’s “INNI” — in which electronic samples of a babbling baby accompany a shimmering Baroque violin — to Hafdis Bjarnadottir’s “From Beacon to Beacon,” which draws on recordings made at lighthouses to create twitchy grooves.

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Perhaps the most captivating music on “Clockworking” comes courtesy of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, recently named the New York Philharmonic Kravis Emerging Composer. In her “Shades of Silence,” tactile effects — a harpsichordist drags a mallet across her instrument’s strings, a cellist sustains gritty glissandos — swirl into an aura of mystery. A second Sono Luminus release, featuring the International Contemporary Ensemble, is wholly devoted to Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s work. “In the Light of Air,” out on Aug. 28, primarily comprises its breathtaking title piece, which had an acclaimed performance at last year’s Mostly Mozart festival.

With a barrage of extended techniques, the expansive vocabulary of “In the Light of Air” makes full-body demands on its virtuoso performers but is also guided by a taut sense of narrative. In the work’s final movement, the percussionist Nathan Davis creates dusty resonances from an installation of metallic ornaments specially designed by Ms. Thorvaldsdottir; the pianist Cory Smythe creates a Debussy-like gauze from a constellation of notes that the composer indicates be played at a pace of the performer’s choosing. Recalling the post-Spectral language of composers such as Toshio Hosokawa and Kaija Saariaho, Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s music conjures unseen worlds. In her score, she asks the players to execute particular passages “with calm & ease and a subtle sense of brokenness.” The beauty of this instruction mirrors the sounds that it produces, infused with a balance of anxiety and luminescence that feels wholly contemporary.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Searching for Beauty Amid Brokenness. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe